“Notwithstanding all that has been and will be accomplished by your enterprising race,” said he, “there are some things about the earth that they will never be able to control or improve. There are two in particular of essential importance. One is the area of the earth’s surface, which your race can never increase no matter what its necessities may be; the other is the slow but very certain refrigeration of the earth’s climate by which we may be sure that a time will be reached in the long distant future when the habitable surface shall gradually be reduced till at last no part of the earth’s surface will be tolerable to any living creature. So in effect while the demand of the race will be for more room it will constantly be required to put up with less.” “But,” said I, “isn’t that a good ways off? The extreme refrigeration of the earth is a process involving millions of years according to our scientists.” “Yes, it will be a long time before any important reduction of area can take place, but not long before the present room will become very much cramped. Only a few moments ago we reckoned that by the year 2070 there would be about two acres to each of the 12,000,000,000 of inhabitants, on which to live and move and produce the means of subsistence. If the race should then be doubling every thirty years, in 2100 there will be but one acre for each; and if they keep on increasing in 2130 a half acre; in 2160 a quarter; in 2190 an eighth, in 2220 a sixteenth; in 2250 a lot thirty-three by forty-one and one-fourth feet, which in 2280 is reduced to thirty-three by twenty feet 8 inches and this in 2292 four hundred years after the centennial of the discovery of America by Columbus that was celebrated in your day at Chicago, will be reduced to thirty-three by sixteen and one-half, or two rods by one. If the population should get to be as numerous as that the entire earth would be a city inhabited twelve times as densely as the city of Minneapolis was in your day. This of course is the average. Some places are more desirable than others and these would be more densely packed. Already at the close of the twentieth century many of the pleasanter parts of the earth have become uncomfortably populous, not from want of the means of subsistence, but from want of room to carry on the business and pleasures of life. And yet the growth of population may be said to be just fairly commenced. It is obvious from what can already be seen that it will very soon be necessary to place some artificial restriction on the increase of population or else there will be such suffering among men as will of itself operate to keep down the number of people by killing them off faster and shortening the average duration of life. These questions are already being seriously considered by the philosophers and wise men, and many plans are being discussed.